Arts & Culture Archives — Page 194 of 279 — San Francisco Bay Guardian Archive 1966

Arts & Culture

Mo Biggie

January 14, 2009

› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER Wait for it, wait for it: the moment when Jamal Woolard as Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. Big Poppa, utters, with admirable understatement, "Mo money, mo problems." The woman he married three days after he met her, vocalist Faith Evans (a sad-eyed Antonique Smith), is pregnant but estranged; his spunky protégé Lil’ Kim (Naturi Naughton) is hopping mad that her lover-protector-mentor has dropped her and is instead bossing her in the studio; his original baby mama is miffed that his daughter gets zero Big Poppa time, and his ex-BFF Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie) thinks Biggie is out to get him, and the East Coast vs. West Coast beef is now fully fired up. ‘Nuff said.

"Mo Money Mo Problems" is the obvious alternate title for Notorious, which has the ring of a men’s cologne by Sean "I Am King" Combs, aka Puff Daddy, aka P. Diddy, aka Diddy, the film’s executive producer. It’s certainly more glammy — and feeds into the mythmaking that Combs has been so adept at when it comes to his Bad Boy artists — than Unbelievable: The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G. (Three Rivers, 2004), the title of the book by Cheo Hodari Coker that this biopic is based on.

The drive-by shooters who killed the legendary rapper, born Christopher Wallace, at the far-too-young age of 24, remain cloaked in mystery, despite the attention given the MC’s murder in Randall Sullivan’s 2002 book, LAbyrinth (Grove/Atlantic) and Nick Broomfield’s ’02 doc Biggie and Tupac, and his death is still embroiled in knotty intrigue, having triggered multiple wrongful-death claims against the Los Angeles Police Department. But of course, history is written by the winners — and those happen to be Combs and Notorious‘ producers, Biggie’s mother Voletta Wallace and Biggie managers Wayne Barrow and Mark Pitts — and in the end, they prefer to skip the speculation and allegations of conspiracy surrounding the rapper’s unsolved murder and focus on the love.

So much like recent musicmaker biopics à la 2007’s Control, which privileged the perspective of Joy Division frontperson Ian Curtis’ wife over his bandmates’, there’s an element of noticeably selective memory-picking to Notorious — even as it tries to play fair with those outside the equation, such as Shakur and Lil’ Kim. The latter has slammed the movie, according to MTV: she believes it hews to the version of history as written by Biggie’s mother and wife and portrays her inaccurately.

Still, director George Tillman Jr. (Men of Honor, Barbershop) seems to have thrived on the tension between a mother who adored Biggie but disapproved of his criminal activities, and label heads and managers aware that the dope-dealing, dues-paying gangsta grind girding Notorious B.I.G.’s lyrics must be shown to authenticate the first-person experiential honesty the rapper was known for. Thus we get a multidimensional Biggie — the big-kid vulnerability he showed to his moms and his "Faith-Faith," as well as the tough, rock-slinging-to-pregnant-crackheads, money-making front. Plenty of respect is also given to the MC’s art, which this rags-to-riches/gats-to-bitches tale (with much due given to a kind of golden-age of hip-hop label patronage in the form of Puffy [Derek Luke] and Biggie’s friendship) reverently visualizes on the street, in the basement, in the studio, and on the arena stage.

Putting his interest in street-level soul, characters less than well-represented in mainstream Hollywood, and his touch with rappers to work, Tillman subtly injects more cinematic interest into his already-dramatic material than it might have had on the page. Biggie’s childhood is washed with glowy, golden hues, while his time dealing on the street is leached of hues and clad in corroded grays, blacks, whites, and browns, until the MC battles another rapper on the sidewalk and color begins to enter the picture.

And unlike 2008’s Cadillac Records, which bought into the overt displays of bling that talent can bring, Tillman and company give adequate shrift to the musicmaking that built Biggie’s renown: the mic is shot as if it’s a grail, swathed in a silvery aura. The symbols of power — such as the Big Daddy Kane–like throne Biggie mounts — speak louder than his kicks, cribs, or cars. And the scenes in which Woolard actually raps — particularly in a basement scene after he emerges from prison and a bout of lyric writing and soul searching — are believable and compelling: flecks of his spit shimmer in the harsh light. Woolard, who grew up blocks from Biggie’s original hood and had a promising career until a shooting in front of NYC’s Hot 97, is the perfect choice to portray the man.

Notorious‘ melodramatic, overly amped conclusion may ring a bit artificial with its drawn-out return to the opening scenes: as "Hypnotize"’s "Rise" sample ripples through the dancers, Notorious B.I.G. says, in flashback, that he’s finally found peace, he’s become a man, and, well, he’s Ready to Die (Bad Boy, 1994), to crib the title of his classic debut. But I dare anyone to not get choked up by Notorious‘ coda, as Voletta Wallace, portrayed with grand-dame grit by Angela Bassett, looks out on the crowd surrounding her son’s NYC funeral procession, playing his music and flinging their arms, and realizes that, though she never quite trusted the easy money and fast friends surrounding her son, Biggie will always be remembered for his way with words.

NOTORIOUS opens Fri/16 in the Bay Area

———–

JUST PLAYING

BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT

It’s not a hologram: the roving musicmakers return to the region they once called home. Wed/14, 8 p.m., $15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

LOS YEUX NOIR

They’re dark-eyed and infatuated with gypsy, Yiddish, and Manouche jazz. Wed/14, 8 and 10 p.m., $20–<\d>$25. Yoshi’s SF, 1330 Fillmore, SF. sf.yoshis.com

LENKA

Cutie-pie pop oozes from the Aussie charmer who once studied acting with Cate Blanchett. Thurs/15, 8 p.m., $13–<\d>$15. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

WILD WEEKEND

We’re lost in an all-girl punk rock wilderness. Sat/17, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE

The popsters go acoustic with tunes from an album-in-progress. Sun/18–Mon/19, 8 p.m., $25. Café Du Nord, 2170 Market, SF. www.cafedunord.com.

BARRINGTON LEVY

The acclaimed live performer taps Obama samples for his new single, "No War." Tues/20, 9 p.m., $28. Independent, 628 Divisadero, SF. www.theindependentsf.com

Goin’ Coconut

January 14, 2009

› johnny@sfbg.com

It was winter-coat weather the night Coconut played music at a release party for a book of Veronica De Jesus’ memorial drawings. After a slide show by De Jesus with a revelation about how the project was born from loss, Colter Jacobsen read a sharp first-person essay about her portraits, those lively renderings of dead poets, movie directors, baseball team owners, and Romanian table-tennis champs displayed on the windows of Dog-Eared Books. Then Tomo Yasuda joined Jacobsen to play some songs. One of them was a quasi-cover of Matthew Wilder’s "Break My Stride" that gave the 1983 white-lite reggae pop hit a heart transplant, allowing the song to briefly race forward before slowing to a near standstill.

Coconut has traveled from a quiet spot to meet you and your ears. The tracks on the duo’s triple CD-R collection, Rain/Cocoanut/Hello Fruity (Allone Co., 2007), form and fade in relation to energy and inspiration. The longest one, "Dubbud Song," might even be composed of the moments between the music: the strums, hums, and drones that briefly take shape and then fall away. There is no need for a vocal on Rain‘s "Blue Umbrella." The guitar sings. On holiday from other endeavors — Jacobsen is a visual artist; Yasuda records solo and plays in Tussle and Hey Willpower; both were part of an earlier group called Window Window and Lets, a side project of Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki — Coconut explores a world of echo at a relaxed pace. Jacobsen and Yasuda are on self-timer.

Now I’m onto another thought: Cocoanut, the silver entry in the duo’s blue-silver-yellow CD-R trilogy, is my current favorite. It might be the way "Tide Sun 7th Generation" layers lolling, rolling acoustic melodies while still leaving room for backward masking effects and other little embellishments. It might be the talky, off-kilter, get-your-goat riffs at the beginning of "Tree of No Tree," before a glowing harmonium harmony arrives to transform the composition into a tango for oddballs. It might be that "Vacation (I don’t want to go to work)" sounds like it was recorded on a warm day in a barn with a makeshift kitchen.

Or it could be the spindly pluck of Cocoanut‘s "Webs on a Grid" and "Evidence," songs that prove Jacobsen and Yasuda are on the sunny side of the ocean on a bicycle built for two. The 101 is a hard road to travel, but they’re ready for excursions into the unknown, so it isn’t completely unsettling when "Webs on a Grid"’s final minor-chord descent is coupled with what sounds like dying stars falling through space. That astral passage and the electronic personality of Yasuda’s too-little-known album For Many Birthdays (Daft Alliance, 2006) make the warp shift to sci-fi dub on Cocoanut‘s final track, "Should I?" — which pushes squares, without the macho math-nerd beat displays — more natural and less surprising.

Back on earth, Jacobsen is inclined to sing for a fine stretch of time every now and then. "Rainbow," a number on Rain, allows him to tease out the difference between a jeweler and a jail man. On Cocoanut‘s "Gannet Song," he blesses the listener with a prankish anecdote. The quiet rustle of his voice moves to the fore on Hello Fruity, where "Human Nature" ponders the meaning of second place in a two-person race, and "100 %" multitracks a godly-and-creamy choir of reassurance into something vaguely unsettling. There is a light sense of wordplay in these tunes that extends to the way other songs’ names ("Sarah Rain," "Rain in Sahara," "Hell O Hello") play off of the CD-R’s titles and each other.

It was T-shirt weather the night Coconut played music at a release party for Bill (Gallery 16 Editions, 45 pages, $25), a collaboration between Jacobsen and the poet-essayist Bill Berkson. Sunlight beamed through the open windows. After playing a set of songs from and beyond Rain/Cocoanut/Hello Fruity, the duo was joined by Berkson. He read a line from the book, and they punctuated it with a brief blast of rhythm or a touch of acoustics. When he reached the end of the poem, it wasn’t the end of the performance — Coconut’s music keeps dancing in and out of San Francisco, and its words and pictures.

COCONUT

With Aero-Mic’d and Elm

Thurs/15, 9 p.m., $6

Hemlock Tavern

1121 Polk, SF

(415) 923-0923

www.hemlocktavern.com

Hang on, Ramsey

January 14, 2009

Venerable jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis will be 74 in May, but you’d hardly know it from his packed tour schedule and mounting awards. The Chicago native and 2007 NEA Jazz Master honoree hosts a nationally syndicated radio show, has recorded nearly an album a year since 1956 plus tours with his trio, does regular duets with Dave Brubeck, and moonlights as a member of smooth jazz supergroup Urban Knights. But perhaps Lewis’ greatest accomplishment was bringing jazz and pop together in soulful harmony.

Sample libraries and hip-hop production would be diminished were it not for Lewis’ funky covers ("Dear Prudence," "Soul Man," "People Make the World Go Round," "Slipping into Darkness"). Likewise Lewis, whose been playing since age four, has a sense of history: he studied Bach, Beethoven, Hayden, Duke Ellington, and Art Tatum before forming the Cleffs with Eldee Young on bass and Redd Holt on drums, his first of many trio configurations.

As the Ramsey Lewis Trio he scored hits in the mid-1960s on Chess-Cadet label releases like "Wade in the Water," "The In Crowd," and Motown cover "Hang on Sloopy." Lewis did for the piano what Stevie Wonder did for the harmonica, made the instrument swing. He also managed to evolve with the times, switching to Fender electric piano and writing originals like "Uhuru" and "Bold and Black" on 1969’s Another Voyage (Cadet) produced by studio great Charles Stepney. Sun Goddess (Columbia, 1974), which showcases enduring Lewis collaborator Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire on drums and vocals, was rediscovered by DJs decades later and ushered in the early-’90s acid jazz movement.

His most recent recording, 2005’s With One Voice (Narada) includes gospel standard "Oh Happy Day," redone with a house groove, and soulful reggae number "Keep the Spirit." These days bassist Larry Gray and drummer Leon Joyce fill out the trio, and the group makes an extended stop at Yoshi’s SF, a great prelude to the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and Barack Obama’s inauguration.

In 1967 Columbia Records president Clive J. Davis said: "In the next century or so, we may very well no longer draw distinctions between what is ‘jazz,’ what is ‘classical,’ what is ‘progressive,’ ‘rock,’ or ‘soul.’ It may all just be called music, and let it go at that. For it’s all here, in the music that Ramsey makes." Davis’ hope for an end to genre distinctions may not have come to pass yet, but he was right about Lewis, it is all in him.

RAMSEY LEWIS TRIO

Thurs/15–Fri/16, 8 p.m., Sat/17, 8 and 10 p.m., Sun/18, 7 p.m.; $65

Yoshi’s SF

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

sf.yoshis.com

Wise blood

January 14, 2009

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

The only real city within a 1,000-mile radius, Denver perches a full mile above sea level, a windswept plateau superficially blanketed by strip malls, widget manufacturers, and convention centers. Bereft of both cosmopolitan peerage and any truly cohesive sense of cultural identity, the loneliness of the native Denverite is pervasive, haunted, and misunderstood, but not wholly undersung. For within the discomfited bosom of the Centennial State, an entire subgenre of music has continued to flourish — attracting devotees from far beyond the state line.

At the forefront of the Denver sound, even before there was such a term, has been David Eugene Edwards. Formerly a member of the Denver Gentlemen — as was fellow standard-bearer, Slim Cessna — Edwards’ most well-known band, 16 Horsepower, had all the requisite qualities characteristic of the Denver sound: conviction, intensity, and an uncompromising spiritualism that manifested itself in fire-and-brimstone lyricism, American Gothic instrumentation, and the feverish denouncements of a traveling preacher man. It is difficult to speak of Edwards without the specter of 16 Horsepower looming large behind the context, but Edwards’ current band Wovenhand, an entity in progress since 2001, has finally broken away from the tyranny of the past to fully inhabit its own potential with a new album: Ten Stones (Sounds Familyre, 2008).

Ten Stones is as elemental an album as Edwards and present company have ever crafted. From the rock-solid, faith-shaken lament "Not One Stone" to the north wind-inhabited "Kicking Bird" to the curiously moving cover of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s "Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars)," which sounds as if it had been recorded underwater, almost every song on the album corresponds intriguingly with a companion force of nature. One of the album’s particular surprises, the druggy rocker "White Knuckle Grip," feels like the rising tension of clouds gathering before a particularly fierce Colorado thunderstorm — the kind that splits the sky in two and harks back to the great flood that drowned the world. The album showcases the metamorphosis of the band as a whole from solo side project into a tightly knit collaborative, drawing inspiration from the impassioned religious fervor for the supernatural that characterizes much of the Denver sound, and from a greater reverence for the immutable power of the strictly natural, and of the music that lies buried at the heart of both.

Peter van Laerhoven, Wovenhand’s lead guitarist since 2005, especially comes into his own on Ten Stones. Like a spirited horse finally allowed his head, he rises to the challenge — penning two of the disc’s songs, most notably the aforementioned "Kicking Bird" — and smoothly lending earthy heft to the otherworldly divergences of bandmate Edwards. Stripped of many of the alt-Americana bells and whistles of Edwards’ earlier music, this strong guitar base helps anchor the tunes in a thoroughly modern context, without diminishing the ageless quality of their emotional weight. And while a driven, revival-meeting furor was essential to the development of the original Denver sound, this willingness to encompass other forms of reverence has become its new watchword. Call it a tempering process, or simply call it maturation. The refined blade of Wovenhand may have been forged in the youthful fires of what was once 16 Horsepower, but with a steel all its own, it cuts straight to the bone.

WOVENHAND

Tues/20, 9 p.m., $12

Bottom of the Hill

1233 17th St., SF

www.bottomofthehill.com

Speed Reading

January 14, 2009

MIXING IT UP: TAKING ON THE MEDIA BULLIES AND OTHER REFLECTIONS

By Ishmael Reed

Da Capo Press

320 pages

$15.95

Ishmael Reed is one of the most prolific writers, seers, and pundits of the 20th and 21st centuries. The author of nine novels, six books of poetry, six plays, and four books of political essays has been a constant presence and persistent thorn in the sides of various official experts. What I love about Reed is his refusal to be classified, stereotyped, or labeled. From his first book, 1967’s wildly experimental Freelance Pallbearers, through a turbulent and often silly surge of academic quarrels, he has shared his vision with bravado and courage.

His latest book of political essays continues his crusade for mother-wit in the face of a consistently homogenized culture, whether through an insightful interview with saxophonist Sonny Rollins, or writing that tackles America’s anti-black lending practices. Reed’s take is plainspoken and no-nonsense, yet an element of whimsy seems to permeate even the most uncomfortable subjects. In an essay about the Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant trials, for example, his observation about hip-hop "pimp-culture" is that "Blacks are just as incompetent in this area of crime as they are in all others. Nearly four hundred years on this continent and not a single Martha Stewart or Ken Lay."

The only drawback of this book is that I get the impression that Reed is spending too much time in front of the television. It’s rumored that he has several sets stacked one on top of another so he can watch them simultaneously.

ISHMAEL REED

With Justin Desmangles

Sat/17, 2 p.m.; free

Koret Auditorium

San Francisco Public Library

100 Larkin, SF

(415) 557-4400

www.sfpl.org

Shock and awe

January 14, 2009

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

After 15 years of a labor of printmaking love in what has become the artistic heart of SoMa, Aurobora Press has to be out of its home at 147 Natoma Street by the end of the month. When the landlord came forward with a tenant able to pay three times what the press was shelling out for the historic back-alley building, built in 1907 with bricks from the rubble of the earthquake, Aurobora — no stranger to our languishing economy — was forced to pack its bags. Standing before a radiantly colored Jay Davis monotype in the press’s small office, director Michael Liener said that he was trying to stay positive and accept that "change is good." But he was clearly in shock, sounding somewhat otherworldly in his soothsaying. "We’re still figuring out where we’re going to land — maybe in a space, maybe not."

In order to lessen its moving load, the press is currently selling framed work at unframed prices, though Aurobora Projects, the press’s showroom in Menlo Park, will continue to operate. Sadly, Aurobora’s coveted residencies, which allow artists who don’t normally work in the medium to come in and make monotypes — paintings on paper, created by inking a flat surface and then pressing it in an intaglio press — are up in the air. In the tradition of early 20th-century artistic crossovers such as French Catalan sculptor Aristide Maillol’s exquisite woodblock illustrations, the residencies have helped artists discover hidden resonance within their own symbolic systems. For example, working in monotype without preconceived notions, painter Angela Dufrense captured the essence of Ivan the Terrible. Local sculptor Stephen DeStaebler saw his signature angel wings and rock-forms expand on paper.

Caught between dimensions and subject to the idiosyncrasies of a big, heavy press, the monotype medium is an ongoing experiment in temporality. Thus Liener is familiar with the unexpected. He stressed that he doesn’t harbor hard feelings toward the landlord, who helped Aurobora get the space in the first place. Liener had been on a month-to-month lease, but that doesn’t make it any easier to leave a space that he created from the ground up. "The question now is, do I have the will, the stomach, the bank account, to do this all over again?" he says. "It’s kind of the end of an era. When we first moved here, we spent four months ripping this place apart, exposing the bare bones, shaping a beautiful gallery." During Aurobora’s time at 147 Natoma, Liener and friends pulled down six rooms, took out the "cheesy carpet," and exposed and patched the site’s original floorboards.

"We were here before the [San Francisco Museum of Modern Art] opened, before the W [hotel], before all the development," Liener observes. "We were out here pioneering. This is just another example of what happens when an area becomes ‘discovered,’ ‘found,’ ‘populated’: the ‘pioneers’ can no longer afford their good work. I’m not unique. This happens everywhere in every city. When you create a really lovely space and you’re here for a period of time, it becomes a selling point for the next person to come in and kick you out." The tragedy is that it’s the quiet little places, the hidden spaces for meditation and contemplation, that always seem to disappear first. And what do we need most right now?

www.aurobora.com

Liebe me, liebe me not

January 14, 2009

By Nicole Gluckstern

› a&eletters@sfbg.com

It might not be spring, but love is already in the air, thanks to a Berlin and Beyond lineup crammed full of romance — as mysterious and elusive as the first vernal crocus. From the grief-stained impressionistic canvas of Götz Spielmann’s Revanche, to the addled office politicking in André Erkau’s Come in and Burn Out, to the sweetly scandalous wartime liaison of Ulla Wagner’s The Invention of Curried Sausage, the vagaries of love, lust, and even plain old like are on diverse display.

Going by typical film fare, one would think romantic love is a sensation reserved for awkward adolescents, torrid 20-somethings, and the midlife crisis set. Any character over 50 is either comfortably married or a lone wolf, and if they display any sexual spark at all it is frequently comic or saccharine. Considering too the usual portrayal of desperate love triangles from which no one exits unscathed, we might further find ourselves taking false comfort in the myth that such messy affaires d’coeur will sort themselves out later in life. With Cloud 9 (Wolke Neun), Andreas Dresen seeks to dispel those myths with a fearless cast of aging ingénues.

When seamstress Inge (Ursula Werner) falls for one of her clients (Horst Westphal), a charming widower whose flirty spontaneity is a distinct contrast to the familiarity of husband Werner (Horst Rehberg), she impulsively gives in to her desires. By turns exhilarated and distressed, Inge struggles to balance her welling fondness for Karl with her habitual devotion to Werner. And though she is cautioned against coming clean by her daughter, she eventually confesses her actions to Werner, who wrathfully accuses her of not acting her age. "What does it matter if I’m 16, or 60, or 80?" she retorts, a deserving question for which none in her sphere can provide a good answer. The unscripted cast members comport themselves with a naturalistic dignity and guileless intimacy even as the movie’s initial optimism takes a sharp downturn into melancholia. Avoiding moral conclusion, Dresen’s quietly resonant film suggests that the pitfalls of mature love are just as treacherously uncertain as its youthful counterpart.

That such uncertainty also belongs to the young is evidenced in Micha Lewinsky’s unusual The Friend (Der Freund), which centers around an imaginary love affair between awkward singer-songwriter Larissa (Emilie Weltie) and her equally awkward fan-boy Emil (Philippe Graber). Agreeing to pose as Larissa’s boyfriend, Emil doesn’t entirely realize his role is to be that of an alibi. Nor does he get time to find out. Before he can solidify the terms of the agreement, Larissa is dead, and her family insists on meeting him. This overtly-dramatic introduction aside, The Friend is a gentle reflection on death’s impact on the living, and the nature of life to move beyond.

Though Emil bears all the hallmarks of a typical loner, by the movie’s midpoint it has become apparent that he is in good company. Each character’s painful isolation is so deeply ingrained they can’t even find words to remark upon it. But despite their instinctive solitude, they can’t help but grasp for comfort from each other, which precipitates a clumsy romance between Emil and his dead fantasy’s sister, Nora (Johanna Bantzer). The final frames might be a shameless rip-off from Fatih Akin’s Edge of Heaven (2007), but the movie that precedes them is a singular creation.

BERLIN AND BEYOND

Jan 15–21, most shows $10

Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF

www.berlinandbeyond.com.

Welles well

January 14, 2009

Many years before the word got sullied on the campaign trail, Orson Welles took up the maverick badge during his acceptance speech for the 1975 AFI Lifetime Achievement Award. Welles used the platform to show clips from The Other Side of the Wind, his comic portrait of an old-time director (played by John Huston) making the rounds in the "New Hollywood" of the 1960s and ’70s. Auteur-worship, Hemingway machismo, and Pauline Kael all come under fire in Wind, a radical film deceptively clothed in shaky handheld camera. The project was in chronic need of funding, and Welles surely hoped that some dues-paying member of the American film society that had recouped Citizen Kane (1941) as a Hollywood classic might step forward to support his new work. They did not, and the film remains unreleased.

For all the fantastic myths that still circulate about Welles, his annotated filmography is the single most intriguing evocation of his career. To be sure, there has been progress since Charles Hingham’s willfully reductive 1985 biography, Orson Welles: The Rise and Fall of an American Genius. Touch of Evil (1958) and The Lady from Shanghai (1948) are widely admired today despite existing in compromised cuts, and the tragic story of RKO’s knee-jerk butchering of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) has passed through generations of cinephiles.

And yet, a full appreciation of Welles’ career continues to be hampered by the notion that it ended with Touch of Evil. Criterion’s stellar edition of F for Fake (1974) helps correct this view, but with even a masterwork like Chimes at Midnight (1965) still unavailable in America, Welles’ late period remains mired in obscurity. Every time a critical appraisal trots out the tired tropes of Rosebuds and wunderkinds, we lose sight of the indefatigable productivity of Welles’ wilderness, etched in the fragmented traces of The Dreamers, Don Quixote, and The Deep, the forays into television and video, the unproduced scripts (The Big Brass Ring) and monologue performances (Moby Dick).

Munich Filmmuseum director Stefan Drössler’s traveling program "Unknown Orson Welles" offers a rare chance to glimpse this material, much of it locked up in legal contestation. It’s an especially invaluable assemblage for a new generation of Welles scholars, a group who will not feel obliged to reconcile Welles’ degraded performance of his personality (the wine commercials and bit parts that financed his work) with his tremendous record of creative freedom. Following the breadcrumb trails of his genius, we find a wellspring of possibility — and little use for regret.

"UNKNOWN ORSON WELLES." Sat/17, 5 p.m.; Sun/18, 2 p.m. $5.50–$9.50. Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berkley. www.bampfa.berkeley.edu

Fair game

January 14, 2009

› superego@sfbg.com

SUPER EGO Oodles of great blasts polished off 2008 — surely more heavenly reassurance that getting fucked up and fabulous is recession-proof, even if your outfit’s from Discount Fabrics and your liquor is too. But my favorite New Year’s Eve party wasn’t one that "everybody went to," or even one I went to all at once.

Hunky Beau and I had just scrammed from our midnight toasts at an as-yet-unnamed new bar on Market Street when the jagged chimes of an amped-up Guitar Hero rang out in the busy darkness. The Zep-like noodling tugged at our ears until we reached Church Street and joined two or three others gawking at the source, as fog-shrouded fireworks boomed in the distance. "This is what 2k9 nightlife is gonna be all about," I slurred in my own mind, because I was shit-faced. "Happy accidents." No strobe lights or Flash site, no four-color flyers or flown-in high-fivers, no electro-this and micro-that and all those totally denied friend requests. Just some cute dude in a light-gray hoodie who plugs his ax into the shut-down Safeway and makes a little dance floor in the parking lot.

It was a New Year’s miracle.

After that peak, I surfed a bipolar adrenaline rush and spent the whole night discoing out of control. At least I could still spend something, right? The After School Special point here is that nightlife is exactly what you make it. Never say a party was boring because that means you were at it. Don’t buy into trends: people who buy too much into trends are like walking planned obsolescences, dissolving in the storm of next new things. And if no one else is dancing, fuck ’em. Do the mashed potato, and get skronked. Everything is on the table.

PARTY MONSTERS So what the hell did happen in Clubland last year? A heckuva lot, Brownie, but damn if I can remember it all. Here are a few things that stood out.

Losses: the great Steve Lady passed away, an incredibly sad asterisk at the end of the Trannyshack, which shut its bloodied wings as hostess Heklina crawled forth to discover herself. Beloved anarcho-hipster hangout the Transfer got gutted so that the kind of OK gay Bar on Castro could move in — opening date: Jan. 20 — and become the, er, Bar on Church. And Pink, one of the few clubs left in the city devoted to house music — remember that? — closed Jan. 4. I disagreed with some of the fancy-schmancier aspects of Pink’s approach, but I still loved it in occasional doses. And I’m hearing rumors about the Stud, right when it’s riding a Milk-mention wave of fame, so please go there and buy cocktails.

Wins: New regular rip-roarers that freaked me included the cumbia-rific Tormenta Tropical, outrageously draggy Tiara Sensation, free-for-alls Honey Sundays (gayish, discoish), and Infatuation (straightish, electroish), roving furry dress-up party Beast, the Hole-y ’90s-worshipping Debaser, slinky Gemini Disco, crazy Look Out Weekend, and the hyperenergetic Work. Gone but not forgotten: Trans Am, Fag Fridays, Tits, Sucker Punch, Stiletto, Monster Show, Drift, and, finally, Finally. Another win: with the opening of Chaps II and the relocation of Hole in the Wall, there’s now a big gay leather SoMa "Miracle Mile" bar crawl again! Overall it was an awesome year, one in which a new generation rushed the club doors, so a big bold heart-heart to all the level-headed bar staff who scraped us off the sidewalk and helped find our flippin’ iPhones. Rawk.

Best: You really need to take the N-Judah night owl bus at 2:30 a.m. Way too cute …

A watched pot

January 14, 2009

By Andrea Nemerson

› andrea@altsexcolumn.com

Dear Andrea:

I am gay and my boyfriend has trouble getting me off. I don’t like anal sex much because receiving or giving it usually doesn’t make me come. And my boyfriend usually can’t get me off orally, either, which means I have to resort to my own hand sometimes. I bought a Fleshlight, which my boyfriend uses on me. I can come with the Fleshlight, but now I feel disconnected from my boyfriend.

Love,

Not Feeling It

Dear It:

No doubt. That sounds a little grim and technical — plugging yourself (or getting plugged) into the sex socket a few minutes a night — and then rinsing it under the tap and going to sleep — sounds more like maintaining a set of false teeth or an ostomy than it does like having a sex life. What’s missing in your story, though, is how it has come to this. I get the feeling you’re young, but how did you operate before this particular boyfriend? And, um, what is he doing wrong?

We all have to resort to our own hands occasionally, and not only do I not think that’s a problem, I quite often consider it a solution. You shouldn’t be the only one who can do anything for you, though. I think you need to undertake a program like those followed by women trying to overcome anorgasmia. Of course, there are a lot of those women and relatively few men in the same boat, and while I know the girly experts and their work, um, inside and out, their male-oriented counterparts and clients are less familiar. Mostly, you hear about premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction. Male lack of arousal and aroused-but-just-not-coming don’t get — rather, have not demanded — the same sort of respect, and don’t get discussed much except in the context of drug side effects, which…. Hey! You’re not taking any antidepressants or anything, are you? That would be great, actually, since if you were your doctor could probably fix this by jiggering your meds or dosages around.

Let’s assume there are no drugs involved. And you can’t have a purely physical problem, like scarring from an operation or diabetic neuropathy, or your Fleshlight (and may I say how much I hate the name of that masturbatory gizmo?) wouldn’t work either. So what you’ve got is something psychological holding you back, or causing you to hold back, however you want to frame it. You could be judging yourself unworthy of pleasure for any number of reasons, none of which really matter here.

If you are focusing on the sex you’re having as a performance instead of as an experience, you are doing what sex therapists call spectatoring — "Do I look hot when I’m doing this? Does he think I’m hot? Is he looking at my (putatively unattractive body part here)? Am I as good at this as his last boyfriend? Is he only with me because of (insert pathetic reason to be with you instead of someone better here)?" — which may sound ungrammatical but is certainly a useful concept. If you’re willing to put in the time with a therapist, or even with a bunch of self-help articles, you can probably figure out what you’re doing and learn to not do that. Since you’re gay, there’s a whole other avenue to wander down, too, the one with guilt and self-loathing and feelings of disappointing parents and angering assorted gods — all those things which have never done sexual minorities any good but can be pernicious and damned near impossible to shake if they happened to get their claws into you. Anyway, you’ll have to learn to stop watching and judging yourself, either by learning to focus on your sensations or on his — anywhere but on your own perceived suckitude, basically.

So, (1) it’s performance anxiety, and therapy, or self-help literature and then therapy if the former doesn’t work, will help. And let us not discount the possible — enormous — benefits of drugs. Say, anti-anxiety meds if it’s determined that you’ve got an anxiety thing going. Also, not that this is a common treatment protocol or anything, but I read one abstract where oxytocin, my favorite molecule and the hormone implicated not only in mother-infant bonding and human orgasm but mammalian pair-bonding and (this may be key here) our ability to trust each other, was successfully used to treat male anorgasmia. Yay, oxytocin!

Or then again, (2) it isn’t performance anxiety so much as it’s the result of initially practical but ultimately unhelpful masturbation habits — you trained yourself to respond to a very specific sort of stimulation. Since none of these other acts or orifices except the Fleshlight approximate what you’re used to, none of them are working. If it’s that, you have to retrain, and it will take a while, but women do it all the time and you can too.

My last suggestion, and please don’t quote me on this: Your boyfriend needs lessons.

Love,

Andrea

Andrea is teaching Sex After Parenthood at Day One Center (www.dayonecenter.com), Recess (info@recessurbanrecreation.com), and privately. Contact her at andrea@altsexcolumn.com for more info.

The Funeral Party

January 13, 2009

PREVIEW By the late 1990s, the better part of the country had reached a consensus. The whole East Coast vs. West Coast thing had officially run its course and was, decidedly, un-chill. A pimp-stick-wielding Snoop Dogg blowing a gasket at The Source Awards and doing his damndest to incite a riot was one thing. But, once the two most transcendent, brilliant musicians of the generation were murdered in cold blood, America and everyone else involved decided, enough was enough.

Ten years on from Biggie’s death, a new crew of whippersnappers has decided to boil up some East Coast/West Coast beef. Though they aren’t talking about engaging in sexual congress with anyone’s betrothed, Los Angeles dance-punk quartet the Funeral Party is sick of the Big Apple hoarding all the indie cred. On the raging "NYC Moves to the Sound of LA," from their jarring debut EP, Bootleg (Fearless, 2008), the precocious upstarts take aim at the "unoriginal," "contrived" New York City scene. Vocalist Chad Elliot venomously spits, "Stole all of your ideas from other cities<0x2009>/ Things are lookin’ stale<0x2009>/ It’s time to turn around<0x2009>/ New York City loves to mess around with the LA sound!" You hear that, Vampire Weekend? You’re fucking going down!

Only time will tell if this sick burn will plant the seeds of a feud that will dominate the back pages of publications nationwide. If I was a betting man, I’d give the "FP vs. NYC" feud between a 2 percent and .00231 percent chance of captivating America. But I would bet the ranch that the Funeral Party’s arresting brand of punk-based dance-rock — imagine Babyshambles on uppers, jamming with At the Drive-In-era Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Johnny Marr — landing them on the front pages of a few magazines in the coming years. Popscene has a knack for booking artists with solid buzzes before they blow up, so get ready to add the Funeral Party to the list of bands you saw before Carson Daly 2.0 informed America who they were.

THE FUNERAL PARTY Thurs/15, call for time, $8–$10. Popscene, 330 Ritch, SF. (415) 902-3125, www.popscene-sf.com

Inca Ore

January 13, 2009

PREVIEW In the liner notes to his Automatic Writing (Lovely Music, 1996), Robert Ashley talks about how he tried to source text for his 1967 opera That Morning Thing by soliciting recordings from his friends narrating, without psychological or moral interpretation, scenes from their life that they’d chosen to keep secret. Describing the results of his survey as "very bad," Ashley decided to synthesize his own text, the result being the viscerally creepy "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon."

The mercurial earth-mother drones of Inca Ore — the solo moniker of Oakland’s Eva Saelens — have, in their blown-out glory, a circuitous sonic relationship with the whining Moog ambience of Ashley’s strangest music, and the raw psychic effects of last year’s Birthday of Bless You (No Fun) are comparable to the composer’s work. Leaping from the absolutely banal to the densely metaphysical, Bless You‘s world is psychology- and morality-free, and when words replace bodiless moans, the effect is evocative, occult, and informed by a slight but potent sense of self-parody. As she declaims through a delay pedal at the conclusion to scrape-scape "Infant Ra": "to all jewels buried in the grass, awake, discovery, in oyster shells!" It’s not a hard world to get sucked into.

INCA ORE With Mangled Bohemians, and the Why Because. Wed/14, 9 p.m., $6.

Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. (415) 923-0923, www.hemlocktavern.com

“Tantalus”

January 13, 2009

PREVIEW Last year’s audacious staged reading of the complete Tom Stoppard trilogy The Coast of Utopia saw the Shotgun Players expanding their already broad horizons to encompass a rarely performed heavyweight piece exploring the roots of Russian radicalism. This year, they’ve raised their own impossible bar even higher, with a staged reading of John Barton’s daunting 10-play cycle Tantalus.

Performed only once in its entirety — in Denver in 2000 — this marathon of myth was Barton’s attempt to fill in what he has termed the "gaps" in the Epic Cycle, which described the rise and fall of Troy in a series of epic poems, many of which have survived only in fragments. Sire of the doomed house of Atreus, Tantalus doesn’t actually appear in his own titular drama, having already been imprisoned by the gods for stealing their ambrosia — and offering up his son in a savory stew. But the rest of the squabbling pack — Agamemnon, Menelaus, Clytemnestra, et al. — play a role, along with a host of heroes, gods, and poets. Performing one-third of the great work on each of three successive Wednesdays, the Shotgun Players are poised, with this epic endeavor, to tantalize us.

TANTALUS Wed/14, Jan. 21 and 28, 7 p.m.; $150 for three performances. Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berkeley, (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org

Martin Puryear

January 13, 2009

REVIEW It’s exhilarating to see, upon entering the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s atrium, one of Martin Puryear’s most renowned works, Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), installed with such noiseless bravura: the 36-foot sapling grows slender and seems to disappear even faster into space as it floats above the elevators. Puryear’s eloquent exercise in perspective and comment on Washington — and his philosophy of slow progress and steady struggle in the fight for racial equality — gathers even more resonance today, thinking of 2008’s lengthy political campaigns and the calls for sacrifice in the recessionary year ahead.

After the conceptual games of SFMOMA’s "The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now" and the almost-fetishized objects of "246 and Counting: Recent Architecture and Design Acquisitions," there’s a lot to surprise — and refresh — the eye in this Puryear retrospective. If "246" startles with its museum recontextualization of almost mundane gadgets like the iPhone, this survey accomplishes the opposite: it quietly brings a primal sense of wonder to the act of walking 360 degrees around sculpture that seems both familiar and alien, bearing all the humble hallmarks of functionality but amplified to the level of fine art. Engineers and architects, woodworkers and basket-weavers, Sea Ranch aficionados and even Olafur Eliasson buffs will find much to ponder at Puryear’s elegant intersection of the raw and the handmade, the organic and the geometric. What comes across clearly in this gradually, gently elucidating exhibit — in which Puryear’s works are displayed thematically rather than chronologically, culminating with an effect akin to a camera aperture slowly swiveling its nautilus eye wide open — is the respect the artist so clearly has for those who study and perfect a craft or trade. It’s as if Puryear has writ large the notion of making: lionizing the utilitarian (Some Tales [1975-78], Lever #3 [1989]) and making it big and beautiful, even witty (Pride’s Cross [1988], Sharp and Flat [1987]), almost Dada-esque in its cerebral and political provocations (Le Prix [2005], C.F.A.O. [2006-07]), and as ovoidally opaque and as fascinated with the negative space within as the surrounding space it so handsomely cuts, without (Maroon [1987-88], The Charm of Subsistence [1989]).

MARTIN PURYEAR Through Jan. 25. Mon–Tues, Fri.–Sun., 11 a.m.–5:45 p.m.; Thurs., 10 a.m.–8:45 p.m. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., SF. $12.50, $8 seniors, $7 students, free for members and 12 and under (free first Tues.; half price Thurs., 6–8:45 p.m.). (415) 357-4000, www.sfmoma.org

Super Lit!

January 9, 2009

Welcome to a super secret book issue, where you’ll find reviews, interviews, and some preview picks for events at the library, where books are relatively "free." I’ll kick things off with a rave for Blaine Dixon’s Polk Gulch (Blurb, 144 pages, $49.95), a semi-self-published collection of photos of life on one of San Francisco’s most storied streets. Blaine’s black-and-white eye is a West Coast counterpart to the Times Square views of Larry Clark and Gary Lee Boas, and the book’s final contemporary color section is packed with wise irony. Polk Gulch may not be what it once was, but Polk Gulch proves small publishing is still spirited, intelligent, and surprising. (Johnny Ray Huston)

www.blurb.com/user/Vercingtorix

>>The wayward west
America is not a freeway in Jon Raymond’s Livability
By Max Goldberg

>>This land was your land
The American West at Risk confronts mine-all-mine mentality
By Amanda Witherell

>>Speed Reading
83 Days of Radiation Sickness, The Photographs of Stanley Marcus and more
New Reviews

>>Herself redefined
The word is the thing in The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
By Garrett Caples

>>Vive l’amour
Stephanie Young remakes icons and images in Picture Palace
By Brandon Bussolini

>>Blessed be
The Necronomicon has an expensive 31st birthday party
By Cheryl Eddy

>>Reel time travel
A book-length encounter with the criminally obscure Ulrike Ottinger
Matt Wolf

The wayward west

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January 7, 2009
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The world falls away again and again in Jon Raymond’s short stories. The 10 pieces comprising Livability (Bloomsbury, 272 pages, $15), the Portland, Ore., author’s first such collection, are introspective ellipses enshrouded in the march of everyday life. We may hear about a job or spouse in passing, but Raymond submerges his characters into stunned states of contingency. Kelly Reichardt’s film adaptations of Raymond’s tales (2006’s Old Joy, 2008’s Wendy and Lucy) surely expand upon their source material, but his third person limited point of view skims existential drift with delicate precision. Whether it’s the dissipation of a Fight Club–inspired adolescent initiation ("The Wind"), a furtive after-hours blow job in the mall ("Young Bodies"), or a search for a missing friend amid the unfamiliar streets of a gentrifying city ("Benny"), Livability‘s plots are liminal hooks, awash in the overcast Oregon sky.

Though not an overwhelming prose stylist, Raymond sutures our reading with familiar ruminations. We have all known "almost lovers" and "might as well have been brothers." Most of us have friends who can "turn everything inside out in two breaths," too. Raymond’s characters have sharp eyes for sadness, spotting regret in everything from the diminishing opportunities for a bargain ("With the Internet, everyone knew exactly what everything was worth") to the misdirected vigor of young fathers ("Only after they’d been beaten up by the world for a good, long time were they ready").

The dearest passages in Livability linger over the unexpected amnesty of solitude. In "The Coast," a becalmed widow admits his guilty relish in being alone: "I enjoyed making the small decisions about which way to turn on the beach … I liked the slight puzzle a single man my age seemed to pose." In "Words and Things," a newly single woman observes the warmth of a cup of tea pressed to her hand, the light of passing headlights, and a silence that "crackled on her eardrums." These snatches pull up short of ecstasy, instead taking measure of the quiet remainder of perseverance.

The culminating story, "Train Choir," stands out for its inexorable chain of events, a heartbreaking progression with the unerring momentum of a ballad. In it, a young woman (Verna here, Wendy in Reichardt’s adaptation) breaks down in Oregon on her way to work the Alaskan canneries with her dog Lucy (who first appeared in the film version of Old Joy). Verna is literally at a loss, but it’s not so much what happens to the character as it is the steady undoing of options that makes "Train Choir" so moving. Even when a menacing turn is diffused, helplessness is still "only a few steps in either direction."

Raymond invokes the domestic dissolution of the George W. Bush era by giving Verna’s journey the telling backdrop of a flood. Given the current headlines, it’s hard to miss the story’s basic yet perspicacious point that the road from Bush’s America is not a freeway. Verna’s careful tally of expenses registers a different picture of money than the one lodged in discussions of "the economy." When a steep repair estimate pushes her over the edge of solubility, the sense of dispossession is sharp, like grief. Verna comes unyoked from society, but "Train Choir" is a frieze of vulnerability rather than disengagement. Verna’s condition illustrates the ease with which one can slip between the cracks in today’s United States — Bush’s rhetoric about the "ownership" society is meaningless to the individuals and entire communities who feel disowned by their country.

And yet, desolation offers its own illumination: "Overhead, the lights seemed to flutter, and for a moment she worried the whole world might disappear. But in fact nothing happened; the world remained as it was. There was no thunder. No lightning." We can read either hope or despair into these lines, but it would be folly to think the two are more than a few inches (or votes) apart.

This land was your land

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January 7, 2009
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Anyone paying any kind of attention has a deep-gut feeling that things aren’t going well for Earth. No matter how fancy or technologically advanced we get, everything humans make and break is fashioned from the resources at hand — water, air, petroleum, minerals, soil and its nutrients, and plants and trees and their fruit. Your MacBook may look space age, but it didn’t fall from the sky. "Nearly everything you use every day is based on minerals mined somewhere, often leaving behind disfigured land and a toxic mess," Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson, and Richard W. Hazlett write in The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery (Oxford University Press, 619 pages, $35)

"Mining is the prow of America’s consumer-propelled ship. Its whole purpose is to dig up resources for transformation to consumer goods," the authors go on to note, with the kicker that such resources are nonrenewable. "A three-bedroom, two-and-a-half bathroom house of about 2,000 square feet, with a two-car garage, central air conditioning, and a fireplace, contains more than a quarter-million pounds of mined metals and other minerals."

The American West at Risk explains the exact effects mining has on Western ecosystems — in other words, the other living things trying to survive alongside humans. Beginning with forests, the authors outline the history of logging and how the right to do it on public lands was weasled from a weak Environmental Protection Agency made even weaker over the last eight years. All professional geologists, the three authors draw upon science in their argument for preservation.

An EPA library in condensed form, The American West at Risk presents a coherent survey of forestry, agriculture, water use, outdoor recreation, road building, military operations, garbage disposal, and nuclear power. "Western US public lands, about 47 percent of the region, are this nation’s patrimony — the bulk of its remaining natural capital," the authors observe. In each of the book’s 13 chapters, they study a single major resource and its uses. The chapters are tidy and stand on their own, but read together, they reveal an abuse of public lands and resources for the benefit of a very few. They also reveal how government science has been warped to perpetuate myths — for example, the idea that grazing on rangelands doesn’t harm the soil, or that military testing shouldn’t have bothersome effects on downwind populations.

The conclusions reached by Wilshire, Nielson, and Hazlett aren’t all doom and gloom — solutions are included — but amid climate change, the authors deserve great credit for not mincing words. The American West at Risk is being marketed as a textbook, and although schools are one ideal realm for its ideas, they aren’t the only one. This book appeals to anyone with an interest in environmental issues, and is essential bedside reading for any environmentalist or activist. It should be read by all Westerners — and by anyone who cares about this great, vast, once bountiful planet, now on the brink of death.

HOWARD G. WILSHIRE, JANE E. NIELSON, AND RICHARD W. HAZLETT read from The American West at Risk. Thurs/8, 7 p.m. at Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness, SF. (415) 776-1111, www.losingthewest.com

>>Read Amanda Witherell’s interview with the authors here

Speed Reading

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January 7, 2009
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A SLOW DEATH: 83 DAYS OF RADIATION SICKNESS

By NHK-TV "Tokaimura Criticality Accident Crew"

Vertical

160 pages

$19.95

It’s tacky to begin a review of a book about death by radiation poisoning by praising the design of its jacket. But I’m afraid I have to — John Gall’s art for A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness is unique in a gaze-snatching fashion. It combines hues of yellow and green, block patterns, and a news photo backdrop into an attractive, enigmatic, and faintly disturbing image that makes a browser wonder, "What exactly is inside this book?"

The answer is an account of a nuclear plant worker’s gradual demise after he was accidentally exposed to 20,000 times the maximum tolerable amount of neutron beam radiation. As some alleged environmentalists (including figureheads such as Al Gore) have begun touting the benefits of "non-carbon sources" of energy — an evasive way of saying "atomic power" — Hisashi Ouchi’s death comes across as an extreme cautionary tale.

Built from a television documentary about the nuclear accident, A Slow Death bluntly but compassionately renders Ouchi’s physical symptoms — which included massive skin loss — and the emotional impact his plight had on the doctors and nurses who treated him. The last extraordinary aspect of Ouchi’s story involves his heart, which persevered and remained relatively healthy while the rest of him demonstrated the impact of radiation — as the book puts it, "it continued living amidst the destruction of virtually every other cell in his body." (Johnny Ray Huston)

REFLECTION OF A MAN: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF STANLEY MARCUS

Photo selection by Allison V. Smith

Cairn Press

192 pages

$60

Sale signs at Macy’s and other businesses tend to suggest that the department store is a 20th-century phenomenon on its way down. But the department store had a great curator of sorts in Stanley Marcus, the Marcus in Neiman Marcus. An over-the-top extravagant collection of the businessman’s photography, Reflections of a Man might seem like a vanity project, but in fact it reveals a talented cameraman and, somewhat enticingly, the aesthetic point-of-view that might have gone into creating a popular chain of stores.

Dallas was Marcus’ home, and his version of the city wasn’t characterized by ugly American cowboy mentality so much as a love of beauty, parties, and profitable combinations thereof — he invented an annual Fortnight celebration as a way to boost sales during the slack period between back-to-school and the holidays. Oscar de la Renta’s brief forward to this monograph is a semi-flattering if fully affectionate account of Marcus’ unflagging success at making a sale. An old press pass reveals he wanted to be a photojournalist, but his public profession proved far more lucrative.

As for the photos, they are gorgeous, Popsicle-bright Kodachrome images of life in the South and abroad in Europe. Marcus had a terrific eye for patterns and repetitions, whether they came from cubic carpeting on the floor of a Paris fashion show or funny visual rhyming between Stetson hats and hanging lamps in a Houston restaurant. Christian Dior and Pucci pose with personality for Marcus, but his skill isn’t so much for portraiture as it is for the art of commerce, capturing the flair of couturiers as well as balloon and sponge vendors on the street. (Huston)

HOME: SOCIAL ESSAYS

By Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)

Akashic Books

282 pages

$15.95

THE HUNGERED ONE

By Ed Bullins

Akashic Books

192 pages

$14.95

I didn’t ask, so don’t tell me why queers have come to be the fashionable sacrificial stooges for pandering new Democratic presidents. For some overstanding on the matter, read Amiri Baraka’s intro to the most recent edition of Home: Social Essays, a collection he wrote between 1961 and 1966 as Leroi Jones. Anyone familiar with reprints of Jones’s autobiographical works knows that they afford Baraka with a chance to engage in scathing (and sometimes funny) multileveled assessments of his past writings and views. Here, he leaps right into a critique of his past use of the word "fag" that insinuates tribute (without naming names) to some of the strong, influential queers he’s worked with over the years. It’s a prescient genuine act, but characteristic — Baraka was calling Obama "slick" years ago at a City Lights reading.

Baraka also writes a preface for a reprint of Ed Bullins’ story collection The Hungered One, but it’s Bullins’ introduction that makes an impression, because of its open-ended refusal of readings that interpret (and thus restrict) the title tale as an allegory. The Hungered One is filled with pieces that do exactly what they set out to do — "An Ancient One," for example, perfectly renders a city scene that happens in front of my building every day of the year. But it’s that title story — more horrifying than anything a genre writer like Stephen King has imagined — that lingers. It’s as uncanny as a nightmare, and as real as human nature. (Huston)

Herself redefined

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January 7, 2009
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although I don’t enjoy real lakes

Barbara Guest, Biography

Barbara Guest (1920-2006) once told me she shared a taxi in Manhattan with Marianne Moore. Seeing Guest unsuccessfully hail a cab, Moore impulsively instructed the driver of the one she was in to pull over and pick up the young poet. Moore didn’t know Guest was a poet, and Guest was too intimidated to confess it, though they had a pleasant chat before Moore dropped her off at her destination.

There’s something fitting about this encounter. Although she most strongly identified with H.D. among modernist poets — even writing 1984’s still-standard H.D. biography Herself Defined — Guest is perhaps more like Moore in terms of her relative position within the New York School. Of the original members — including John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch — she is the most obviously difficult. Unlike her relatively postmodern colleagues, she primarily engaged with a high modernist aesthetic attuned to both the arch formalism of The Waste Land-era T.S. Eliot and the strident irrationality of surrealism. The result was a truly singular aesthetic, yielding, as The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest (Wesleyan University Press, $40) demonstrates, one of the most radical bodies of work in 20th century literature.

Difficulty is, of course, a vexed question; poetry’s perceived difficulty frightens off even readers of the most abstruse fiction. Some of Guest’s poetry is admittedly taxing — a book like Rocks on a Platter (1999) is nearly impenetrable to me, despite my appetite for such work. But the bulk of Guest’s writing is difficult only if you assume the goal of poetry is to make sense, which it isn’t. The greatest poetry exceeds meaning, suggesting more than it says, suspending language’s sense-making capacity in favor of the word as thing. If you forego the demand that poetry deliver a coherent picture or scenario, Guest becomes much less difficult. You simply follow, without worrying where you’re headed.

In Symbiosis (2000), for example, one of Guest’s increasingly abstract later works, we find these three lines: "In no climate whatsoever / noise traveling up the tower<0x2009>/ bronze green in the tournament … " Quotation out of context hardly distorts the passage because it’s never clear what the context is, the lines appearing apropos of nothing before or after. They remain stubbornly themselves, resisting meaning. You can propose a tower "in no climate," but the very definition of "climate" presupposes its ubiquity; everywhere has a climate. More pertinent to Guest’s concerns are the subtle musical echoes between "noise traveling" and "bronze green," or the disposition of the word "tower," scrambled throughout "whatsoever" and translated into French as the "tour" of "tournament." These are hardly Guest’s greatest lines, but they indicate some of her procedures. The poems are generated less by "the real" than by words themselves, their use as material objects, which is what I mean by "the word as thing."

To see early work like The Location of Things (1960-62) and The Blue Stairs (1968) back in print is thrilling, while the bird’s eye view of Guest’s career is revealing: nearly half the collection was written in the last 10 years of her life, indicating the mastery she attained. The array of forms is remarkable — just when she seems to embark permanently into a Mallarméan scattering of phrases across the page, she shifts to the microfictional prose poems of 1999’s The Confetti Trees. A short section of new work at the end suggests yet more possibilities. But as the Collected Poems shows, Guest had done enough.

Vive l’amour

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January 7, 2009
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REVIEW Stephanie Young edited the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 432 pages, $29), which attempted to take a snapshot of the Bay Area’s poetry scene while acknowledging the failure built into such a task. Her second book of poetry, Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 120 pages, $15), is not particularly concerned with choosing between various poetic modes and traditions. Picture Palace draws as heavily on pop culture as it does on theory to find its form and to subsequently understand form’s impact on content. In the process, Young escapes the lyric poetry/language poetry binary. (Or, to use a less geography-bound but equally contemporary axis, the flarf/conceptual poetry binary.)

As its title suggests, Picture Palace is heavily invested in movies. Young makes and unmakes icons as well as the minutiae of daily life. On the theoretical tip, she applies Gaston Bachelard’s thought in books like 1994’s Poetics of Space and 1987’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire to the act of walking around Lake Merritt. In terms of ideas and visual imagination, Picture Palace is best described as dense. Images and their aftereffects are at play, but the reader has to dig for the gratifying thrill of recognition; even when a pop-culture reference is spotted, it has a strange murky glimmer. Young is both recovering a shared experience and implanting a new one when she writes lines like "Tim Robbins with Tupac<0x2009>/ the one where they stabbed each other<0x2009>/ for treatment," in "Betty Page We Love You Get Up."

There are other funny moments (the most intense flashes of Sylvia Plath’s "Lady Lazarus" are condensed into the formula "Rising, ash, eat, air, etc."), yet the real thrill of Picture Palace comes from the way it jumps between different levels of knowledge, in the kind of epistemological recreation that brings us back to Bachelard. Young’s ability to portray, in tandem, the way her speakers routinely perceive the world and the way they are able to break with those perceptions, and the ways of knowing the world that those perceptions embody, reminds me of the libretti of Robert Ashley’s operas more than it does the work of other contemporary poets. Much like the titular protagonist of Ashley’s Now Eleanor’s Idea (2007), her poetry is haunted by an "end of the world feeling," but where that feeling prodded Now Eleanor to pursue investigative journalism focusing on New Mexico’s lowrider culture, the same feeling pushes Young’s speakers to ponder and deform images projected onto, or from, screens: "There was a superimposed face on my face and I gradually came to see my own belief that it could never change. In this way my face functioned as an image on film."

The overall effect — and this seems like an inaccurate phrase, given how much Young’s poetics depends on micro-effects, small calibrations, and reversals of thought — is similar to Lynne Tillman’s 2006 novel American Genius. By this I mean that both writers’ driving concern is finding new forms to convey new experiences; they each establish a voice that, in its neurotic precision, contains multitudes.

Blessed be

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January 7, 2009
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What the hell is the Necronomicon? A figment of H.P. Lovecraft’s imagination? A demon-awakening tool foolishly deployed in the Evil Dead movies? A manifestation of Aleister Crowley’s magical powers? Or simply a good old-fashioned hoax?

For purposes of this review, Necronomicon (Ibis, 220 pages, $125) is none of the above. Assume, if you will, that it’s a tome based on Sumerian mythology, filled with line drawings and incantations. It’s bound in ominous black with silver lettering and a built-in ribbon bookmark — all the better to keep important verses ("The Exorcism of the Crown of Anu," perhaps) at your fingertips. It’s edited by the single-named "Simon," who has been on the Necronomicon beat since 1977. According to Wikipedia, Simon’s interpretation has sold nearly 1 million copies. According to his author bio, his best-selling whereabouts "have been unknown since 1984" — until this 2008 re-release, anyway.

The Necronomicon is a fearsome-looking addition to any bookshelf. It’ll definitely enhance any library lacking in new age creepiness. But, uh, one more time: what is it exactly? Fortunately, Simon doesn’t leave you dangling. This edition comes complete with a new preface (helpfully explaining the significance of a deluxe 31st anniversary volume, lest you think someone dropped the ball during an even-numbered year), as well as earlier prefaces and an introduction that discusses Lovecraft, Crowley, and occult history. There’s also a pronunciation guide (since when uttering the incantations, "a mistake may prove fatal"); and a solemn page-and-a-half warning that dicking around with the Necronomicon can have serious consequences. There’s no mention of having to cut off one’s hand and strap on a chainsaw in its place, but readers who are also movie buffs will nod knowingly.

OK, then the good stuff (purportedly ancient curses, rituals, spells, etc.) begins, kicking off with "The Testimony of the Mad Arab" and continuing into chapters like "The Incantations of the Gates" and "The Conjuration of the Fire God." Names dropped include Pazuzu, of Exorcist fame. Not everything’s gloomy though; instructions on how to "win the love of a woman" and "restore potency" are included, along with poetry that could pass for death-metal lyrics: "I will cause the Dead to rise and devour the living!" Cookie Monster that!

All right. I’m pretty close to mocking the Ancient Ones here. If you happen to see me coming down the street (you’ll know it’s me — just listen for the "fearful howlings of a hundred wolves"), you might want to scrape together the dough for your own Necronomicon, just for protection purposes. The price tag on Simon’s brand-new version suggests to me that demons might really be pulling the strings somewhere along the way.

Reel time travel

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January 7, 2009
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How often do you encounter a living artist whose radical and prolific body of work is criminally obscure? I can’t evangelize enough about the German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose work is the subject of Laurence A. Rickels’ Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography of Art Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 288 pages, $22).

Some glimpses into Ottinger’s dazzling and genre-defying oeuvre: baroque lesbian pirate adventure (1977’s Madame X: An Absolute Ruler); an aristocratic alcoholic tourist drinking herself to death in a post-apocalyptic West Berlin (1979’s Ticket of No Return); and a trans-Siberian train journey that makes an unexpected pit stop in Mongolia, where a two-hour ethnography of an all-female tribe unfolds (1989’s Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia).

There are hardly words to describe these striking and innovative films, but Rickels’ ambitious new book — drawing upon extensive interviews with the filmmaker — provides compelling interpretations. I recently interviewed him via e-mail.

SFBG It puzzles me how Derek Jarman’s queer-punk classic Jubilee (1978) is available as a Criterion DVD and Ulrike Ottinger’s contemporaneous and similarly groundbreaking Madame X is virtually inaccessible. Why do you think Ottinger isn’t better known in the states?

LAURENCE A. RICKELS Ottinger was very well known throughout the art cinema network in the 1980s. Though [her] fiction films were "long" in density and attention-surfeit, they in fact observed the time limits of features made for theatrical release. With the turn to documentary, she engaged in what I once referred to as "real time travel" — involving durations of viewing time up to nine hours in length. But once she began again to show her photography in acknowledged art venues, her current film work was rediscovered at least for that world.

Just as important, no doubt, is her refusal to release her films as readily available videos or DVDs. But this brings us back to the point that she operates, even when she identifies herself as filmmaker, as an artist who tries to oversee her reception.

SFBG Many of Ottinger’s films — both the documentaries and narrative films — deal with the exotic and otherness. She persistently crosses genres, cultures, and genders.

LAR What is so radical about her film art is an insistence on encountering the other, on meeting the other "halfway." For the other’s arrival, Ottinger constructs out of her own (formal) language a sort of terminal, which anticipates or fantasizes about what the other will bring to their "first" contact and exchange.

SFBG Which film from Ottinger’s oeuvre is essential viewing for those who haven’t seen her work? What about this film should a new viewer expect?

LAR If I had to choose one, it would be Ticket of No Return. It introduces the viewer to the distance Ottinger observes with regard to the very conditions of trauma. By drinking herself to death, the protagonist seeks, as Nietzsche counseled, to become who she is.

SFBG In your book you describe Ottinger’s next narrative work, Diamond Dance, about Jewish gangsters in Brighton Beach, the diamond business in New York, a gay psychoanalyst, and more. The film sounds incredible. What’s happening with the project?

LAR Diamond Dance was a new fictional film project at the start of the 1990s. There have been more near-miss attempts to find suitable conditions for its realization, even according to a more modest plan. However, Ottinger has not given up, and has been revising some of the pressure plot points in the original screenplay to reflect and invite another time period in which the film will be made and set. But the original film is in a sense lost — together with the era of art cinema to which it belonged.

Scary kids scaring kids

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January 7, 2009
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PG TERROR The real magic kingdom is Disney Inc., which has managed to completely dominate family entertainment for at least 70 years, from Snow White (1938) to High School Musical 3: Senior Year (2007). Yet there was a period in the 1980s when the post-Walt studio appeared to have lost its way. The old formulas seemed tapped out, and attempts to find new directions floundered, at least commercially.

Thus there was a rush of incongruously un-Disneyesque titles venturing boldly into PG terrain: 1979 sci-fi thriller The Black Hole (featuring Anthony Perkins’ drilling death); 1980 musical flop Popeye from least-apt-Disney-director-ever Robert Altman; 1981 medieval horror Dragonslayer (which had a priest flambéed in closeup); 1982’s psychedelic Tron; 1985’s seriously depressed fantasy Return to Oz, and so forth. Many of these have since developed cult followings, but they were pretty unloved back then.

One such notable failure — though somehow every kid of the era seems to have experienced nightmares from seeing it — was 1980’s The Watcher in the Woods.

Based on Florence Engel Randall’s young-adult novel, it has the Curtis family — parents Carroll Baker and David McCallum, ex-pro ice skater Lynn-Holly Johnson’s oft-hysterical psychic teen Jan, and child horror-film regular (and eventual Paris Hilton auntie) Kyle Richards as demonically possessed tyke Ellie — renting the requisite spooky old English country mansion from spooky old Mrs. Aylwood (an imperiously restrained Bette Davis), whose own daughter mysteriously disappeared three decades earlier. Myriad inexplicable, near-fatal events targeting Jan point toward an explanation both supernatural and sci-fi.

Watcher‘s tortuous history exemplified a nervous studio’s conflicting impulses. Disney wanted to make something "darker" — or did it? Rewrites lightened up scary material. There were creative arguments and forced changes during filming. Yet the often beautifully atmospheric film’s woes had only begun.

The plug was pulled on completing elaborate F/X for a parallel-dimension climax, making for an abrupt, critically panned ending. This version was yanked from theaters after brief exposure in April 1980. A re-release in even softer form followed 18 months later. No less than three alternative endings were shot; Disney still refuses to release credited director John Hough’s preferred cut. Midnites for Maniacs programmer Jesse Hawthorne Ficks doesn’t even know which variant will open his "Broken Homes for the Holidays" triple bill. It’s followed by 1986 classic Stand by Me and 1973’s diabolically clever drive-in sleazefest The Candy Snatchers.

"BROKEN HOMES FOR THE HOLIDAYS"

Fri/9, Watcher in the Woods (7:30 p.m.), Stand by Me (9:45 p.m.), The Candy Snatchers (11:45 p.m.), $10

Castro Theatre

429 Castro, SF

(415) 621-6120, www.castrotheatre.com

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